


Liminal

by spacehopper



Category: Prey (Video Game 2017)
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Gen, Identity Issues, Loss of Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-20 07:36:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14256096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/pseuds/spacehopper
Summary: It is, and isn't, Morgan Yu.





	Liminal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumi/gifts).



Her fingers tingle with the traces of warmth from Alex’s hand. They’re talking now, as they walk down the corridors of the ship, and she feels light, free in a way she hasn’t felt in years. Alex cracks a smile when she points out a flaw in one of his projects, and it almost feels like old times.

Until they reach the lab.

It’s in the center of the ship, guarded by the strongest locks and doors to keep the Typhon out. Or, she amends, as the door whooshes open, to keep them in. The containment unit in front of her is empty, but she knows that recently it was occupied. She remembers—

“Morgan was so close to making contact, finally making them understand.” Dark lines of pain thread through Alex’s voice, and she wants to reach out. But instead she crosses the room, and places her palm, pale and strange and solid, flat against the glass. 

Morgan. Them.

“Some of the Typhon had stopped attacking her, started seeing her as one of them. We hoped—” He sighs. Gold filaments weave through the air in front of her, but she no longer hears their call.

“You hope I can replicate her research?” It’s the first thing she’s said since she entered the room.

You hope I can replicate her?

Turning away, she goes over to Alex, standing next to him in front of a console, reams of data laid out in front of them. Alex gives her a strange look, almost squinting, as if her edges are blurred. Maybe they are. Maybe that’s how they’re supposed to be.

She smiles.

“Where do I begin?”

Her hand rests on the screen, and goes black before her eyes. 

*

It is, and isn’t, Morgan Yu.

They leave it alone, after that. As it wanders the halls of the small ship, it hears them talking. Adjustment period, remember how Morgan was, the shock to the system. 

Pale, wormlike fingers hover over the panel. 0451, skin making contact with lit plastic numbers. The same as her office. Morgan’s office. 

Inside there is a bed. Does it need sleep? A human needs sleep. Vision is blurry and strange. From somewhere, the information surfaces. Sleep is needed for memory retention. It should sleep. 

As it lies down, closes its eyes, it hears the whir of operators, thudding footsteps, trilling voices.

“It did everything right.” Igwe says this, and it imagines the man, not the machine. The music had been beautiful.

“But there’s been something wrong with it since.” Danielle, still wary. But she has cause. The Yu family has done much to deserve her caution, her fear, her ever burning ire. 

“She just needs time.” Alex, who desperately wants his sister back. Even a twisted remnant of her, monstrous and strange. 

Their voices quiet, their steps fade, and sleep proves evasive. She doesn’t like it when they talk about her like she isn’t there, like she can’t understand them. But she can’t blame them either. They’re so used to thinking of the Typhon as monsters, the clawing, crawling darkness. The operators were people once, before the Typhon destroyed them. It wonders, did it help? Did it consume their corpses, absorb their vocal patterns? It can’t remember. 

But it wonders.

(Did it wonder, before?)

It doesn’t matter now. Her fingers curl into the pillow, and she tries to get some sleep.

*

Sometimes it remembers.

Hunger. But also light, and the fission of neurons connecting to a greater whole, a golden web. Sometimes it can feel it still, hand dissolving black and cold and longing. But it doesn’t like the way Alex looks at it when it does that. It—hurts. Hurts Alex. She doesn’t want to hurt Alex.

She doesn’t want to _hurt_. 

Her small, delicate hands clench with inhuman strength around the wrench. It would be so much simpler, so much easier, to twist with dark tendrils and pitch black thoughts. Easier to repair; easier to destroy. She shuts her eyes, shuts her mind, reaches. For what she doesn’t know. For Morgan? For Alex? For her?

“Morgan?” A shush as the door shuts behind him. She drops the wrench.

I am not Morgan. The words echo in the cavernous expanse of her chest, rattle up her throat, tangle in her strange, meaty tongue. But her lips remain shut, and she opens her eyes and smiles.

“What’s up, Alex?”

It’s what Morgan would’ve said. 

He crosses the room, limping slightly. A mimic had gotten in, and Alex has never been much of a fighter. Only his age had given him an advantage when they were kids, lording superior height and strength over her. Once she’d grown up, it hadn’t mattered anymore.

They had other ways to fight.

Her eyes follow the stiff line of his arm, ears catching on the rasp of his sleeve against the desk as he deposits something there. A memory drive of some sort. She stands before she’s realized it, wrench falling with a clang, drive clutched in her hands. 

“What is this?” Her words are too deep, echoing, bouncing off curved walls and shifting matter that shouldn’t be. She clears her throat, adds in a voice she’d last heard come from an operator, “That is, what’s on it?”

Alex’s eyes have widened, dark and fearful, but he smiles, putting his hand over hers. He wants her to be here. Wants Morgan. Or her? His hand is warm. 

“Just a few files, from before. I thought they might help you.” 

“Me.” It’s a statement, a question. Me wasn’t, before. She wasn’t, before. 

She is now. She’ll watch the files.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Anything you want.” It’s a normal thing to say. That’s why he’s happy. But he won’t like what she says next.

“What happened to Morgan?”

*

She is, and isn’t, Morgan Yu.

How can she be, when she’s able to shift herself away from this universe, trade places with a mug, a chair, a wrench. Force her will onto others, twist the very fabric of reality. She is more, she is less.

And sometimes, in her darker moments, she wonders if it would be better to give in. Why, after all, are they better than the Typhon? They’d destroyed the earth just as carelessly, and far more callously. Perhaps it was best to let it go. 

Perhaps she’d understand.

“We need to keep testing. It’s dangerous, but it’s the only way.” The words eat at her. Had she stopped the tests before, maybe they wouldn’t be here. Had she stopped the tests before, maybe they’d all be dead. The darkness writhes behind the barrier while Alex watches the monitor. 

She doesn’t know which of them she’s more like anymore.

“Morgan.” He’s scared. Not of the Typhon, no. Not of her. But losing. They have little left but each other, now. “We can’t afford—”

“Nobody else can do it. You know that, Alex.”

“But the experiments—”

“Are fine without me. As long as you stay.” And it’s no question he will. Alex has never been much use in a fight. “Sara and I will go. We’ll get the Typhon material. And then, well.” Her face twists into a rueful smile.

“Then we see if we can make another me.”

Alex shakes his head and mutters something about needing to check the ship’s fuel lines, and she lets him leave. Trying not to think, if he lost her, if she lost him—

She shakes away the thought, and presses her palm against the glass. The edges blur and flow like ink. On the other side, the Typhon waits.

“We aren’t the same. But we will be.”

*

Alex’s clipped, pained words are pale shadows of her memories. That final mission, and yet—

“If Morgan died, how did you find me?” Me, not Morgan, not her. 

Alex’s lips tighten, and he puts a hand on her shoulder. 

“We already had you.” Shadows behind glass, Alex looking down at a monitor. “Morgan was after something else.”

Memory and thought, patterns and paths created over a lifetime, re-written in a moment. Lips cracked, slightly chapped, form words, sounds twisted into meaning by a clever tongue.

“I know how to find her.” 

*

She will be Morgan Yu.


End file.
